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1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to evaluation of stimuli. More specifically, the invention is a method and system for determining the effectiveness of stimuli using the Internet for evaluating stimuli and their effect on respondents.
2. Background of the Invention
Various methods for determining the effectiveness of a stimulus, such as an advertisement or a pictorial display, are well known in the art. For instance, researchers often conduct non-computerized studies on the effectiveness of a stimulus, usually in an academic, non-profit, government, commercial environment, or the like. A researcher will assemble a pool of respondents who they will then ask to view a stimulus. For this example, assume the stimulus is a print advertisement. Each respondent, in isolation except for optionally the researcher, will view the stimulus. The researcher will then ask each respondent what he or she liked, disliked, etc. regarding the stimulus. These questions are generally referred to as attitudinal questions. They will often continue by asking the respondent whether he/she is more or less likely to purchase the goods or use the services advertised as a result of viewing and/or interacting with the stimulus. These questions are generally referred to as behavioral questions. Other attitudinal and behavioral measures include what characteristics of the goods and services are important/unimportant, the potential purchase frequency of the goods or services and the relative preference versus competing goods or services. At some point in the research process the researcher will ask the respondent classification questions to determine in which demographic the respondent belongs. Classification questions include questions relating to age, gender, income, marital status, parental status, job type, and the like.
Non-computerized research is extremely time consuming and requires extensive resources such as research personnel, physical space to conduct the research, respondent pools, and requires that the respondents physically travel to the research location. Also, this method of research does not allow a researcher to understand the interaction of a respondent with a stimulus and the stimulus"" relationship to their attitudinal, usage, and classification responses.
Researchers in this manner evaluate many different types of stimulus, including print advertisements, television advertisements, radio advertisements, photopictorial displays, physical designs of consumer goods, movie trailers, television programs, editorial contents, book jackets, clothing designs, automobile designs, and the like. However, researchers could not evaluate these stimuli based on the precise portion of the stimulus at which the respondents were looking. Later developed were systems to track eye movement that attempted to measure which portion of a stimulus was being viewed. However, there was a bias inherent in these systems that detracted from their accuracy to such a degree that researchers often would not use them because these systems would contaminate the rest of the researcher""s data.
With the advent of computers, researchers began executing research by programming computers to ask the respondents a variety of research questions, including attitudinal, usage, and classification questions. Computers made research interviewing more efficient and more effective. The computer programs written would automatically record the respondents"" responses for analysis at a later time. While this was an improvement, large amounts of resources were still required. That is, candidates still were required to travel to the research location, physical space must still be provided for the research to occur, computers must be supplied for the candidates"" use, and there must still be a large pool of candidates willing to partake in the research. In addition, the researchers were still not able to compare how a respondent responds with how they act in observing the stimulus.
In the above examples, candidates are often drawn from the student body of a university, or advertisements are dispersed in search of respondent candidates in a local geographic area. Both of these techniques limit the respondent pool to either a predetermined group of individuals or individuals located within a limited geographic area.
With the advent of the Internet, researchers became able to show stimuli to and get responses from respondents in a non-personally interactive way. Researchers, and professional research companies, began developing websites through which research was undertaken. That is, respondents visit the website, view the stimulus on the website, and respond to questions regarding the stimulus on the website. An example of such a website is www.greenfield.com. There was also the development of specialized software that tracked a respondent""s navigation throughout a website by recording the hyperlinks on which a respondent clicked and in what order the respondent clicked on each of them. Also recorded is the amount of time between hyperlink clicks. In this manner, researchers and proprietors of websites can determine which pages of a website are viewed most often and for how long each was viewed. However, the present methods of tracking do not allow a researcher to determine which portions of a web page are viewed when the web page size is greater than the browser window""s height or width. That is, researchers cannot measure what the respondents are specifically looking at within a web page.
In similar fashion, software has also been developed that monitors when a respondent clicks on a banner advertisement on a website, and monitors any subsequent transactions with the advertised company. That is, it is recorded whether the respondent purchased goods from the advertised company or not. However, in using these types of systems, while researchers are able to draw from a larger respondent pool, the research is still limited in that the respondents are studied in an environment where there is no understanding of actual stimulus viewing and the relationship of stimulus viewing on attitudinal, usage, and classification measurements. In the above examples, it is not possible to accurately compare how a respondent answers research questions with how the respondent behaves while interacting with a stimulus.
The present invention is a method and system of evaluating a stimulus and the effect of the stimulus on a respondent using a computer network such as the Internet. The invention can be used to more effectively evaluate any stimulus that may be presented via a personal computer connected to a network.
The invention asks a respondent attitudinal and/or behavioral questions, then monitors a respondent""s behavior while viewing a stimulus. In one embodiment, the stimulus is stored on the research taker""s server. The stimulus can be any type of stimulus that can be stored on and presented using conventional personal computers. The system monitors the respondent""s behavior through use of a computer program associated with a web page used to display the stimulus.
In another embodiment of the invention, the stimulus is a website stored on an independent website host""s server. The research server acts as a proxy server, filtering the web page information on the fly by rebuilding hyperlinks, canceling xe2x80x98postxe2x80x99 operations, and associating program code with the filtered web page to enable the system to monitor the respondent""s behavior. The system monitors and records the hyperlinks on which the respondent clicks, the amount of time between hyperlink clicks, and the portion of the web page the respondent is specifically looking at by recording in one-half second intervals the coordinate of the pixel in the top left corner of the viewable area of the browser window and the size of the viewable area of the browser window.
In one embodiment, the system invites a respondent to participate in the research study, presents usage questions to the respondent, stores answers to the usage questions in the computer memory, presents a first stimulus to the respondent, measures the stimulus reception and processing data, optionally presents one or more additional stimuli, measuring reception and processing data for each one, presents a first set of attitudinal questions to the respondent, stores answers to the first set of attitudinal questions in the memory of the computer, re-presents at least one stimulus to the respondent, measures stimulus perception and processing data, presents a second set of attitudinal questions to the respondent, stores answers to the second set of attitudinal questions in the computer memory, presents third set of attitudinal questions to the respondent to measure delayed impact, store answers to the third set of attitudinal questions in the computer memory, optionally performs a telephone interview with the respondent, stores answers from the telephone interview in the computer memory, collects and integrates the results database, analyzes the database, provides a score as an indication of at least one stimulus from the research study, and provides substantive feedback to the stimulus owner.